My officials can seek out the exact number, but certainly it was part of our platform and part of the budget to put more money in to deal precisely with that issue. That has been done. As well, we may get more money in future budgets. That remains to be seen.
We're also working very hard to improve the efficiency with which we process people. For the same amount of money, we can process more people if we do it more efficiently. From the great efficiencies we've learned with refugees, we can transfer some of that learning over to other streams of immigrants.
In terms of your basic question, yes, you are right, refugees are very important. Refugees have been very much in the news. But I would say the single most important commitment we made in the election platform was to bring down the processing times for family class. Over the last 10 years, those processing times have ballooned through the roof to an unacceptable level. In particular, if the heavy hand of the Canadian state keeps spouses apart for two years on average, I think that is unacceptable. We will have measures to deal with that in a serious way soon. I cannot announce it today, but in a number of weeks we will be moving on that.
There are other things that are also important: parents, grandparents, caregivers, PR cards, and others. I put particular attention on the spouses, as part of the nuclear family, as being the really high priority. It's partly because for parents and grandparents, as a consequence of the diminished intake in the large numbers of parents and grandparents allowed to come in for a number of years, that processing time will come down automatically and significantly over the next few years.
That will solve itself, in part, but the spouses need direct action from us to solve it. That will be our first priority. We will come forward in the coming weeks, as they say, with action in this area.
